Powered By The Sun – Our Farmhouse Is Solar & That Lights Up My Day

One of the things I haven’t really brought up about the incredible place on earth where we’ll be celebrating Women At Woodstock this year is the fact that it’s solar-powered. Not sure why I haven’t said anything; it’s one of the things that sealed the deal for me when I first checked out Lifebridge Sanctuary.

The reason for my enthusiasm is that I’m a lifelong environmentalist: My childhood consisted of camping, Girl Scouts, hiking in the San Jacinto mountains with my dad, and observing parents who never, ever littered and who re-used brown paper lunch bags when that was totally uncool. I earned a science degree in college. My first career, practicing law, was as a prosecutor for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And I passed along my family legacy of loving and respecting mother earth by recycling before it was commonplace and eschewing energy wasting or environmentally damaging practices like the use of electric can openers or buying bottled water by the case for everyday consumption. It brought me great joy to fill my own children’s childhood with annual camping trips to the Adirondacks. After my law career, I was a board member and one-time president of Northeast Ohio’s Earth Day Coalition during the years that I lived in Cleveland, and when I returned to California I got a gig for a couple of years handling PR in the USA for Sharp Electronics’ Solar Energy Division, then the largest manufacturer of solar panels in the world. When California went into the drought, my husband Brad and I tore up our acreage (OK, that’s a joke; we live in Southern California! – so, what I mean is our front & back lawns) and put in a nearly total xeriscape.

So you can understand why it fills my tree-hugging heart with joy to know that we will be drawing our energy directly from the sun all during Women At Woodstock . I just found this little video on the Lifebridge website about the installation of the solar array on the property. Take a look: